April 29, 1998

Who Are These People, Anyway?

By ANN POWERS

rying to label America's nearly 60 million teen-agers is about as easy as staying on the trail of a
snowboarder in a whiteout. No definition can
stretch far enough to include bubbly Hanson fans and
moody Marilyn Manson devotees, marijuana-smoking
homeboys and savvy junior entrepreneurs, born-again
virgins and single moms, student activists and frustrated truants -- especially when one teen-ager might
inhabit several of those identities. As adults circle,
fascinated, teen-agers survive and thrive within these
interlocking universes. If these teen-agers must be
tagged, call them the Autonomous Generation, creating
themselves in nobody's image but their own.

Nicole Hernandez is one such 1990's teen-ager. She
lives in Elmhurst, Queens, but not with her parents.
Fleeing a troubled home, she became an emancipated
minor last year and moved in with her boyfriend and his
mother. Nicole likes going to clubs and concerts, but
spends most of her time juggling high-school classes,
chores and a full-time restaurant job.

"It's hard," she said during a recent interview on her
one day off from work. "I have to help pay the rent, and
if I don't pass all my classes I don't graduate. But then
there are days when I just want to hang out with my
friends and be young like I was a year ago."

Or consider Henry Gregoire, a 16-year-old from Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn.

Vehemently straitlaced about drugs and sex, busy with an architecture
internship, which takes him to Manhattan three days a
week, Henry cannot wait to grow up. "I could almost say
I have more adult friends than regular teen friends," he
said.

His father is a rap fan, but Henry prefers 12th-century Celtic music. "My dad says, 'You and I are
different people,' " he reported. Henry has made another choice common among 90's teen-agers: to pretend
that his adolescence does not exist.

Then there is Danny Stolzman, who is soon to graduate from Fieldston School, a private school in the
Riverdale section of the Bronx. Danny plays on the
baseball team, acts in school plays and belongs to a
group that collects pennies from schools that are used to
finance inner-city social programs. He says his parents
are "fabulous." Yet Danny, who says he smoked marijuana in eighth grade, has already experienced enough
to have grown cautious about reckless consumption. A
few months ago, he quit cigarettes because he was
worried about living long enough to see his grandchildren. "We feel the doors closing," he said. "It's up to us
to grow up and to figure ourselves out."

It's no wonder that teen-agers have become "Titanic"
maniacs: for them, life can seem like a huge vessel
veering out of control, a situation they must negotiate in
spite of adults who alternately harass and ignore them.
With many parents working or absent, schools sometimes in disarray and a future contingent on acquiring
job skills, high grade-point averages and thick extracurricular résumés, adolescents often shoulder enormous
responsibilities. At the same time, their freedoms are
being restricted by authorities who think they are both
dangerous and endangered.

Instead of talking back to adult assumptions, teen-agers would rather look to one another the way Jack and
Rose did as the ship sank. They communicate across the
Web in the language of hip-hop and skateboarding slang,
and through the most effective form of pedagogy going
-- peer education. When they make alliances with
adults, they want them to act as peers, too. Acknowledge
their power, engage their ideas. Just don't treat them
like the teen-agers you think they are.

In the 90's, stereotypes about teen-agers have been
inflated to ridiculous proportions. Adolescents are causing trouble everywhere: getting sexual on "Dawson's
Creek," lurking in melodramatic movies like "Kids"
and "Hurricane Streets," scowling seductively in Calvin
Klein ads and then seeming to bring the perversity of
those images to life in shocking tabloid tales. The
juvenile delinquent has become the superpredator. The
troubled teen-ager needs Prozac. Lolita is Everygirl,
pushing up adolescent birth rates in
her hot pants and navel ring.

The problem is that public conversation about teen-agers is dominated
by adults, and it is pressing young
people into their own spheres.
Emerging as the largest age group in
the United States, teen-agers recognize their own overwhelming presence on the American cultural landscape. Yet they often feel strangely
uninvolved.

"Everything's geared toward people who are young, or people who want to feel young," Danny
Stolzman said. "We don't really have
a way of rebelling."

Historically, adolescence has generated a healthy confrontation that
Danny cannot find now, when young
people banded together against their
elders' status quos, and a balance
was eventually struck. These days,
teen-agers unite against the very
idea of adolescence. While some certainly rebel in time-honored fashion,
few relish being seen as young.

"I fit more into teen-age categories when I was in sixth grade,"
explained Louise Levy, a 14-year-old
freshman at Stuyvesant High School,
the most competitive public high
school in New York City. "Now I
don't like teen-agers who are supposed to be teen-agers."

More than ever, teen-agers feel
compelled to reject the group identity that society imposes on them, and
instead embrace a radical self-reliance that veers between proud pragmatism and frustrated isolation.

This is not the nihilistic denial signaled by the suicide of the rocker
Kurt Cobain, who was a generation
older than this current one.

It is a
practical move, meant to clear space
so that young people can get on with
their lives. The typical teen-age
problems -- existential uncertainty,
shaky self-esteem, the struggle to
master your own destiny -- persist,
but teen-agers fear that their vulnerability will be used against them.

Kara Wentworth, another Stuyvesant freshman, feels this anxiety.
"I'm really not liking school at all,
and I feel like it's time for a career
change, but there's nothing I can do
about it," she said. "I feel like the
only motivation to do well is so my
parents and other people won't see
me as a conventional kid."

James Wagoner, the president of
the social-service organization Advocates for Youth, often encounters
such ambivalence.

"Young people
have been portrayed almost universally as a set of problems to be
managed by society: juvenile crime,
teen-age pregnancy, drug use," Mr.
Wagoner said. "That concept has
taken such deep root that various
institutions are permeated by it. And
there's not enough of the other view,
of youth as an asset, a group of
people with their own perspectives
on things who do pretty well."

Teen-agers feel this lack. "I'm not
sure that I'd go for sitting down and
being really polite with adults and
telling them what we need," said
Jonathan Berger, an 18-year-old who
has been a students' rights activist
since he was 12. "It should be young
people having the original idea, having complete control, but adults being there to assist them. That's the
most valuable relationship I see."

Could this be the end of adolescence, which, after all, was an artificial life stage imposed when pubescent youngsters were taken out of the
work force and placed into the adult-training programs known as high
schools? For many teen-agers, it
might as well be. They get nothing
out of being squeezed between the
role of the child and the adult. "When
I was in eighth grade, I had a little bit
of the teen angst thing going on,"
Jonathan recalled. That was before
he started selling his handmade pottery in stores, joined Act Up and
began regularly attending New York
City Board of Education meetings.

The contradictions that teen-agers
face come, in part, from their greater freedom. They have more mobility and privacy than ever before. And
many parents, especially baby
boomers who fought for their own
rights as youths, are trying to develop more equal relationships.

"My father went to Columbia in
the 1960's, during the student takeover," said David Pristin, another
Fieldston senior. "He had a much
harder time with his parents. My
parents have made a big point to tell
me there's never a problem too big to
go to them with. And I would fairly
easily go to them."

Yet even liberal-minded parents
like David's often fall prey to the
aura of danger that surrounds adolescence today. "There have been so
many myths about teen-agers that
most parents are afraid of raising
them," said Lynn E. Ponton, a clinical psychologist and the author of
"The Romance of Risk: Why Teen-Agers Do the Things They Do."
"They react when they see the kid
taking even tiny risks."

David admits that he fears this
response, especially regarding his
romantic life, which he keeps private. "I know one kid whose girlfriend's father kept telling them to
use condoms, and they weren't even
close to having sex yet," he said. "I
sometimes think parents expect the
worst."

Responsibility is a gift some parents don't know how to give their
children. Other parents simply relinquish it. Many young people must
assume duties that the adults in their
lives cannot handle themselves. The
relationship Nicole Hernandez has
with her boyfriend's mother is emblematic. "She doesn't tell me anything," Nicole said. "I cook for her
and she cooks for me.

It's equal. It's
not like we're under her."
N
ICOLE describes teen-agers
like herself as "little adults,"
juggling nearly as many responsibilities as people twice their
age do. Their difficulties are intensified by the fact that usually they are
still treated like children in the public sphere. A recent backlash has
resulted in stricter curfew laws, restrictions on speech in high-school
newspapers and on the World Wide
Web and the threat of criminal prosecution for nonviolent offenses like
smoking marijuana.

"The Fulton Mall won't let kids in
during school hours, even if it's
clearly a half day," complained 16-year-old Anesia DeFreitas, who attends Science Skills Center High
School in Brooklyn, but lives in Jersey City, where her family moved
recently. "The library won't let you
in during school hours. Nor will McDonald's. You can buy your food, but
they won't let you sit down and eat
it." (A Fulton Mall spokesman says
there are no restrictions on teen-agers. The Brooklyn Public Library
says it reserves the right to ask
students why they are in the library
during school hours. And McDonald's says it has no national policy
but local restaurants may have one.)

Shut out of the larger public, young
people have created their own means
of being heard. They have published
their own manifestoes in photocopied
fanzines, made their own music and
shared it on cassette, designed their
own fashions and arranged to have
them sold in boutiques. These enclaves crop up in society's margins
until the hungry marketplace co-opts
them for wider consumption.

But teen-agers confront larger issues than choosing sneaker styles. A
far-ranging girls' culture, which includes bold young athletes, musicians, film makers and writers, is
invigorating the discourse of women's liberation. Activist groups like
YELL, an Act Up youth division,
which counts Jonathan Berger as a
leading member, have devised new
approaches to safe-sex education.

Indeed, sexual identity in general
has become a more talked-about subject. "The children have come out
earlier," said Verna Eggleston, who
is the executive director of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a Manhattan
center for gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender teen-agers. "We have
straight kids who have gay friends
and want to be with them, or whose
parents are gay or who just think this
is a cool center. We have some who
fall into the category of questioning
kids. Some eventually choose to be
gay, and some don't."

Today's youth culture is marked
by a diversity that goes beyond tolerance. "Their world is getting more
raceless," said Susan Kaplow, the
development director for Alloy, a
popular catalogue and Web site that
features a rainbow coalition of fashion models. "Kids don't really think
black and white."

Teen-agers nationwide may still
move across boundaries more easily
when shopping than when making
friends, but in New York at least, the
border crossings go deeper: all the
youngsters who spoke about their
relationships for this article said
they had dated interracially.

As their parents turn inward, concentrating on personal fulfillment
and making money, young people are
coming up with their own social vision. "The baby-boom psyche is focused on the development of the self,
whereas young people are preoccupied with multicultural diversity and
globalism," said Donna Gaines, a
sociologist of youth who teaches at
Columbia and is the author of the
1985 book "Teen-Age Wasteland:
Suburbia's Dead-End Kids." But
these positive trends are often ignored.

Where adults and young people
meet is the proverbial mall. Teen-agers have always been a target
market, but a strange thing has happened since the 60's. As consumers,
many adults have retained an adolescent attitude. "Nobody wants to
get too much older," said Tamra
Davis, a film maker whose credits
include such young-adult favorites as
"Billy Madison" and "Half-Baked."
Ms. Davis, who is 36, sees perpetual
adolescence as particularly appealing to her own age group. "All those
people who were hippies and became
yuppies seem like sellouts," she said.
"Our generation tries to figure out
how to not make an extreme switch."
I
N the past, teen-agers had few
freedoms, but what they chose to
buy -- Elvis albums, for example,
or zoot suits -- separated them, almost becoming a form of resistance.
Now adults indulge in the same fantasies teen-agers have. Yet Ms. Davis has taken an extra step by cultivating high-school girls who are interested in becoming film makers;
most others just buy from the teen-age world and then retreat.

To make things even more complicated, forces outside the marketplace tend to condemn the very products sold to youngsters as harmful.
Conservative assaults against gangsta rap and Marilyn Manson, ostensibly meant to protect youth, end up
feeling like attacks, some kids say.

"You have kids doing all sorts of
things with popular culture, but they
have been reduced to consuming subjects, not citizens," said Henry A.
Giroux, a cultural theorist whose
books often examine the complicated
interplay between selling youth culture and restricting it. "When you
say kids are overly influenced by the
media, you imply that they are dupes
unworthy of being citizens."

Since consumerism is the only
kind of citizenship they are usually
offered, young people use it the best
they can, turning the rhymes of hip-hop into shared histories and transforming Internet chat rooms into impromptu community forums. Educators like Mr. Giroux believe that
teachers and other adults should get
in on this process not as voyeurs or
as potential buyers, but as mentors.

Social-service organizations, like
Advocates for Youth, which uses
peer education as a primary channel
in spreading a message of responsible sexual behavior, and the Girls
and Boys Clubs of America, which
held a national conference organized
mostly by teen-agers, offer proof
that this approach works.

Programs that treat teen-agers as
people and not as problems allow
them to feel safe enough to be vulnerable. This way, most turn out to be
not too different from what teen-agers have always been: hopeful,
daring, eager to be heard.

"Have you noticed how the kids
are into really big items?" Ms. Eggleston asked. "Huge clothing, skateboards, hats. They want us to see and
hear them. They've found their
voices, unlike us. You've got 20-year-old talk-show hosts; you've got MTV.

"We've expanded our technology
to get to this point," she added.
"However, our hearts have not
caught up to the technology. So
they're screaming. We as adults
would do best to listen."

Ann Powers, a pop critic for The New York Times, is writing a book about modern-day bohemianism.